Denver’s Worst Web Habit Is the One Customers Feel First
Denver small business sites average 56 out of 100 for phone speed, 21st of the 24 cities I checked. Almost every other check in town sits near the top.
For years I thought I could pick Denver’s slow websites out of a lineup without loading a single one of them.
I had a picture in my head, and I bet you’ve got the same one. A clip-art envelope beside the email address, a hit counter nobody has reset since 2011, a phone number in a font that was never chosen so much as accepted.
That site, I’d have told you, is the one that keeps your customer waiting.
I was wrong, and it took a few thousand audits in the same order every time before I’d admit it. The abandoned ones are usually quick, because there’s almost nothing on them to be slow.
The order I go in
Every site I look at gets the same walk, and I keep the order fixed so I can’t flatter anybody by starting somewhere kind.
Does the business have a website at all. Does it load over a locked connection. Does it fit a phone. How long does it take to show up. What’s it built on. What does it put out.
Denver clears the first two of those without me finding anything worth writing down. A website is the normal thing to own in that city, and Denver locks more front doors than any city I checked.
Which of those six would your own site trip over?
I reach the fourth one and Denver falls flat on its face.
Step three, which Denver passes
Owners mix the phone questions up constantly, so let me separate them before the bad news.
77.7% of Denver sites pass a basic mobile check, where 78% pass nationally, which puts the city right around the average and nowhere near the problem.
That check asks whether the page tells a phone it was built for a phone. It costs you the sale in the half second a thumb aiming for Book Now lands on Directions instead, and the customer decides your website is broken rather than that they missed.
Passing it means your page fits the hand holding it. It says nothing whatsoever about how long that hand has to wait.
When did you last watch a stranger use your website on their own phone, without helping them?
Step four, where I stopped
My speed test ran 3,514 times across Denver and settled on an average of 56 out of 100, which sits under the national average of 58.
Three cities came out slower than Denver, and every other one came out faster, which leaves it 21st of 24 in a place that wins or nearly wins almost every other check I run.
The test isn’t a stopwatch on my laptop, either. It loads your page on a simulated phone over a deliberately slow connection, which is a great deal closer to your customer than your office wifi will ever be.
Google files a score like that under needs improvement, which is a polite way of saying most people won’t wait around for it.
And how long do you last, personally, before you back out of a website that’s making you stand there? Nobody has ever answered me with a big number.
Speed is also the check where the cost never announces itself. Nobody complains. They simply aren’t there.
A woman gave up on a gym’s website before the class schedule ever arrived, and nobody at that gym heard a word about it.
Step five, and my best guess
My data can tell me who’s slow. It can’t tell me why, so what follows is a decade of opening these things rather than a finding.
None of those platforms is slow the day you sign up. All of them get slow the same way.
You add a booking widget, then a chat bubble, then a video of the shop playing quietly behind your logo because the one on your competitor’s homepage looked great.
Then an advertising pixel from a campaign that finished in 2023. Then a gallery where every photo came off a camera at full size and got shrunk with a line of code instead of being properly resized.
Not one of those was a stupid decision. Every single one arrived recommended, and every single one made complete sense on the morning it went in.
None of it is mysterious, either. Every piece you add carries a weight, and the phone pays for all of them.
Can you name everything loading on your homepage right now, without opening it? I can’t do it for mine either, and building websites is the entire job.
One bad decision has never yet made a website slow on me. It takes eighteen months of good ones, each landing on top of the last, made by people doing their jobs properly.
Step six, which explains a lot
The last question on my walk is what a business actually publishes, and Denver had an answer ready for me.
43.1% of its sites run a blog where nationally it’s 37%, and I’d call that a city taking its own websites seriously.
Every extra page, photo and embedded video is also one more thing a phone has to drag down a cell tower before your opening hours appear.
So the story isn’t that Denver ignores its websites. Denver cares about them a great deal, and then builds something heavy.
When did your homepage last lose something instead of gaining something?
Why I’d fix this one first
Every other check on my list is a favor you do for a robot. Speed is the only one your customer lives through personally.
The robot cares as well, mind you. Google says it uses the phone version of your site for indexing and ranking, so it’s the sluggish copy sitting your exam.
But the part that costs you money never turns up in any report I could write. How would it? Nobody files a complaint about a page they gave up on.
Someone taps your link, waits, gets bored, hits back and taps the next result down instead. You’ll never meet that person, and they’ll certainly never email to explain they’d have hired you if the photographs had arrived a bit sooner.
They vanish, and your analytics quietly files the whole thing under bounce.
How many unexplained quiet Tuesdays have you had this year? Neither of us can ever know, which is exactly what makes speed such a rotten problem to own.
Now go and be unkind to your favorite one
The site I’d bet on losing this race isn’t the dusty one with the hit counter.
It’s the one someone has been looking after. New pictures every month, a chat widget because a consultant said so, a video because the competitor had a video.
Loved, and heavy, and getting heavier every time anyone does it a kindness.
Which of the two would you bet on, honestly, with your own money on the table?
So take the site you’re proudest of and treat it like a stranger would. Walk outside, off your wifi and onto cell data, open it in a private tab so nothing’s remembered from last time, and then open your closest competitor’s.
Whichever one shows up first has just won a customer who was never going to mention it to either of you.
If yours lost, nine ways to fix it are over here, and I’d start with your photographs, because it’s nearly always the photographs.
And if what you need turns out to be a rebuild rather than a rescue, start with a Denver web designer who treats speed as part of the build. Speed gets designed in at the start or argued about forever after, and the arguing costs more than the designing ever did.
